Tag: VMware

Late last week, VMware and AWS announced a partnership where by VMware workloads will be able to run on AWS. The way it works is as you request the service, ESX hosts and a vCenter get spooled up and configured on bare-metal hardware within AWS datacentres.

This vCenter then connects to your existing environment and will allow for live vMotion of VMs between your on premise and the AWS cloud!

This is potentially a big shift in how companies will consume cloud services as essentially no re-architecture of applications is required to leverage the benefits of cloud – on demand, as-a-service model. ESX hosts and storage essentially become “unlimited” capacity, as at any moment you have the ability to request more resources! No lead times, no capital expenditure.

This is really cool and I think will make a big impact, especially for larger organisations. For more information check out the VMware Cloud on AWS website.

The PowerShell execution policy is a good feature from a security perspective, but in most cases it is just plain annoying, especially when running scripts from Group Policy, Task Scheduler, or some other sort of remote mechanism. This article shows you how to bypass the PowerShell execution policy on a machine so that you can run your script on a system irrespective of what execution policy is set.

Recently I needed to configure all of our 50 or so ESXi hosts to forward SNMP traps to our corporate monitoring solution. This meant enabling and configuring SNMP on each of the hosts. Naturally, I wrote a script for this as 50 hosts is way too many to do manually.

This article shows you how configure SNMP on an ESXi host manually, via PowerCLI and via host profiles.

If you have ever managed a VMware environment that contains virtual machines with RDM (Raw Device Mapping) disks then you will know it is a pain to track and manage RDMs, especially when trying to distinguish which VM has a specific RDM disk attached or if the RDM is still attached to a VM. You will also know that it is nearly impossible to find an RDM (and the corresponding VM) based on RDM’s LUN ID.

To ease the management burden of RDMs, I have written a script to search for a specific RDM by LUN ID or alternatively to get a list of all RDMs, their LUN ID, Capacity, Disk Identifier and the VM they are attached to. Below is the script and all of the details you need to get it up and running in your environment…

As a VMware Administrator, from time to time you will need to manage disks & datastores in vSphere. The following post is a quick reference guide on how to complete some common datastore and local disk management tasks in a VMware environment:

Sometime back in 2011 when I first started using PowerShell, I developed some standard functions to handle the creating and management of log files for my PowerShell scripts. These functions were stored in a file called Logging_Functions.ps1 and I would simply dot source them into my script to be able to use them.

I posted them on 9to5IT PowerShell: How to easily create log files for your scripts and since then, to my surprise, they have been well received by many people, and hence the post has become quite a popular one. Recently one of the users emailed me and made a suggestion to convert them into a PowerShell Module.

That got me thinking…. so I have made a number of improvements to the PowerShell logging functions and have now made them available as a PowerShell Logging module. Available right here, below….